Shelly Lundberg is the Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Bergen, Norway. She received her Ph.D in Economics from Northwestern University in 1981 and her B.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1975. She is past President and a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, past President of the European Society for Population Economics, has served on the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America, and was Chair of the AEA's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession from 2016-2018. Lundberg was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2020.

Lundberg's research is focused in labor economics and the economics of the family, and includes both theoretical modeling (of discrimination and inequality and of family decision-making) and empirical analysis (of marriage and fertility, labor supply, wage determination, and intra-household allocation of resources). Her current research examines the sources of educational inequality and of gender gaps in education. Recent projects include studies of decision-making by children, the effects of child gender on parental behavior, the location decisions of married couples, the impact of government-provided care for the elderly on the labor supply of adult children, and the economic and social returns to psychosocial traits.

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in July 2004.